Startup Watch: HowToHeatPress.com

Tell us about your business.

Our website provides resources for the ‘mommy’ crafting community in the US.

Our focus is on heat press and cutting machines which are used to make custom t-shirts and other craft items. We review these machines and drive traffic to the sellers websites. In exchange we earn a commission.

Who and where are your target customers?

Our target audience are ‘moms’ in the US. Most of our visitors come from Texas, Florida, and California. However, it’s fun to see people viewing from all over the world.

How and when did you first come up with the idea for your business?

We took a very expensive online course which taught us how to do what we do.

Part of this course helped us to come up with a niche to build a website around. We already had an interest in the crafting field and so it was a natural fit.

We like to think that this niche wasn’t found by us, but we were found by it!

What are your three biggest unique selling points?

How to Heat Press is a great example of an information based business that can be run from anywhere in the world.

Many other sites in this niche do not actually use the products they are reviewing. They may have never even laid eyes on them. We actually love the process of making our own tees. We think heat press and cutting machines are really cool!

Our web design is far better than competing websites. I think my wife Naomi has a real gift for making things look good. She’s had no formal training, but just learns how to do it on her own.

We put a lot of time into our site. We really enjoy when we do and have a lot of fun learning new skills and putting them into action.

What are three things about your business that you are proud of?

Our visitor growth after less than a year is now approaching 30,000 unique visitors per month despite having no previous website building experience.

The content we provide our visitors. So far we have created over 60 unique and original articles to answer our visitors questions about heat presses and cutting machines and this has been rewarded with those growth figures.

Lastly just the fact that we went ahead and started this business even though we had no previous experience in business, website building or anything like that. It was only through listening to all sorts of podcasts and education programmes in my job as a house painter that I learnt about businesses like this and then we went ahead and just took action on finding a course that taught us how to do it. If you are open to learning, there is always a way.

How do you market your business and what advice do you have for others around marketing?

A lot of our marketing is done through social media. We go where our audience is and provide them with quality, good looking content.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in building your business so far?

The biggest challenges have been on the legal/tax/payments side of things. Because we are earning our income in the US, it’s a bit more complicated than earning it here in New Zealand. Talking with the IRS over Skype can be a little daunting!

What is the biggest entrepreneur lesson you would like to share with other Kiwis thinking of starting their own business?

Don’t give up. Even when you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, keep going. You can’t fail if you don’t give up!

There were times when we thought to ourselves, ‘This is never going to work!’ But we just kept at it and slowly but surely things took off.